The acceptable face of the unacceptable

It will escape no Oxonian’s attention that Tommy Robinson, convicted criminal, former BNP member, founder of the EDL and now Elon Musk’s favourite British fascist authoritarian, is appearing at the Oxford Union this week. Arguments against his invitation to the Union in particular have already been made in this magazine’s sister publication. The greater issue at hand is the national threat Robinson poses, as the acceptable face of an increasingly aggressive, worryingly violent, right wing militancy. A threat that has primarily spread through digital vectors and is now having a deleterious real world effect on the safety and wellbeing of Britons.

 

Robinson’s biography and deeds have been covered well enough, and he is infamous enough to need little retelling here. From a political birth in the explicitly fascist BNP, to the foundation of the EDL—a front for right-wing football hooligans to conduct their violence behind a false facade of injustice— to his current career. One that largely consists of moonlighting as a professional personal tout, willing to say or do anything inflammatory enough for the right price. He played a key part in the race riots of 2024, weaponised the murder of Henry Nowak, embodying the ‘pure cold rage’ Nigel Farage called for in response and remains a favourite of America’s resident chud-in-chief, JD Vance. Robinson seems to have gained an aura of untouchability, where no mainstream progressive feels willing (or able) to challenge him, and where the professional, middle, and upper classes feel both intimidated and impressed by him.

 

Dispensing with the obvious, Robinson is not some persecuted truth-bringer nor a righteous revolutionary. He is as low and base a thug as Ernst Rohm was; his lack of quasi-military uniform, replaced with overly tight jeans and t-shirts, does not wash the essential stain of brutality from him. But like Rohm, the SA, the Stalhelm and innumerable other right wing paramilitaries-cum-political movements that characterised Weimar Germany, he illustrates something beyond a personal failing. The arrival and proliferation of such groups is the product of three conniving ingredients: a culture which tolerates or encourages such radicalism, a state which is too weak to properly restrain them, and political actors who are fundamentally reluctant to do anything that might produce short-term instability. Keir Starmer is no Friedrich Ebert, but his toleration of the militant forces on the right and his inability to move the state to action against them is worryingly similar.

 

The sad truth is that Robinson’s current campaigns —against woke, against the Sikh communities, against immigrants under the cover of protecting women and girls—will not be the end of his efforts. Few could credibly or seriously say that if he were to achieve all he wants—a country expunged of ethnic minorities and returned to the social mores of the atomic age—he would transform like Paul on the Damascus Road and become some enlightened purveyor of stability. He is a rapacious seeker of conflict, someone whose idea of society aligns with fascism to an uncanny degree. The term ‘fascist’ has been overused into oblivion in the years following World War 2. But for Robinson, with his violent, anti-democratic and reactionary ideas hinging on a mobilisation of his supporters against society in some perpetual campaign, the shoe fits.

 

It’s also clear how successful he is. The idea that in 2026, we would return to the sort of racialised violence that blighted Britain’s streets in decades gone by, confining whole communities to their homes as faceless mobs ransack their streets, would be for the birds until a few years ago. Yet now in Northern Ireland we see precisely that. ‘Hit lists’ of addresses to be targeted, people being burnt out of house and home and chased down streets by lowlifes. One NHS nurse was on her way to work when she was chased and intimidated by four masked men in Belfast. Any argument that these are not riots, or that these are acceptable expressions of citizen’s discontent, regardless of the history of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland, is so false as to be embarrassingly hollow. Robinson continues to promote and organise against the state, and is the spiritual figurehead atop these moments of chaos. No serving UVF or IRA men were ever allowed to appear at the Union—but someone who would like nothing more than to see Britain reduced to mob violence is(having also appeared on Question Time six years ago).

 

Whilst Nigel Farage has gone to great pains to disavow any link between Robinson and Reform UK, Matt Goodwin, the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, refused to disavow his endorsement, and many of the party membership like the man. The splinter parties further to the right, like Restore and Advance, hanker for a smidgeon of the interest Robinson would bring to their parties. For Oxonians, the threat of his tacit toleration is real. Despite the effusive denials the Union might offer, inviting such a purveyor of filth, is unlikely to produce the sort of Sorkin-esque own that they swear they seek. Instead, this travelling band of bigots will arrive in Oxford and bring the same burning hatreds to our streets. For a President who promised stability and made her name in Oxford on a platform of social justice, standing staunchly and  most visibly with  Palestinian movement, to so robustly defend such an invite is bewildering. How many Oxford students have spent the last two summers shut in at home, afraid of openly celebrating their faith as part of the rich diversity of British belief, as the rebranded baying mobs of the EDL hammer on their doors? 

 

To publicly disagree with such a man would be brave; to roll out the red carpet for him is disgraceful. No polite, petty bourgeois ideas of ‘dialogue’ will mend the broken windows Mr Robinson leaves in his wake, nor salve the terrified children who are told they don’t belong. For all the President and Union hacks at large might pose as champions of the oppressed and forgotten in their election manifestoes, the proof is in the pudding; they are little more than the nascent underlings of tomorrow’s right. It is not hard to imagine the hacks who today staff St Michael’s flocking to Tufton or Fleet Street upon their graduation, facilitating and elevating the same division and fear that works so potently in Oxford upon a national audience. At a time of chaos and fear, with the protests around Henry Nowak and the riots in Northern Ireland, the judicious decision would be to disinvite Robinson. In this regard, the President has not been ‘misquoted into silence’—she appears all too keen to pass the microphone to one of the most repugnant voices in British political life.

But we need not surrender to the growing drumbeat of alt-right violence and hatred. For the thuggery, brutality and hatred that characterises these people is a reflection of their internal distress, not some unseen national tempo. Britain has her problems – no one can refute that. To resort to throwing bricks and firebombs, to hurling slurs and salacious slanders against whole communities is the coward’s way out, the preserve of the privileged or the wasteful. For that great body of all the classes, such discontent undoubtedly exists. But rather than seeking destruction, they seek to work to build something better, to restore a just and equal society where all can get on. That task, of building and renewing a nation’s faith, is a hard one, all the harder after forty years of neoliberalism. But it is the only way.